Miter Saw Handle Repair

I bought a nice miter saw off E-Bay, but when it got here, it looked like someone at UPS ran over it with a fork truck. The blade was still reasonably good, so I decided I would re-make the handle.

Step one was to piece the old handle back together. Then I traced it on a nice piece of scrap cherry that I happened to have around the shop.

Careful sawing with my turning saw, made from plans from "Tools for Working Wood" and then a lot of rasping with my Nicholson wood rasp resulted in a pretty good basic shape.

Next, a careful cut for the blade with a little tennon saw and some carefully drilled holes for the screws finished up the whole thing. I attempted to drill out a hole for the medallion with a spade bit that I had. This wasn't the best choice. A Forstner bit would have worked better. Anyway, it saws well and fits into my Langdon miter box like it was made for the job, which it was.

Rip Saw Handle Repair

I have a nice Bishop thumb-hole rip saw that I picked up for almost nothing. However, it had a severe problem with the handle. A big part of the horn was missing. Typically, I would just throw such a saw out and get another one at a local garage sale, but I decided to try a rescue.

I mixed up a batch of two part epoxy and threw in some mahogany wood dye that I happened to have on hand. I then made up a quick form around the remains of the handle horn and poured in the epoxy. What came out was pretty crude, but after extensive rasping, the final results was at least functional, if not beautiful.

The epoxy is very shapable, i.e. easy to work. I'm glad I rescued the saw, since I'm partial to Bishop Saws, which were made right here in Cincinnati.

This Old Stanley #5C is One of My Favorite Hand Planes

There are certain critical things about a plane that make it functional, and other features are just not that important.

This old Stanley #5c was given to me by a well meaning friend who knew that I liked old tools. This monstrosity was the worst ball of rust I'd ever seen when I got it. The tote was loose and in two pieces. The blade was unspeakably dull and misshapen. However, two things made me attempt to restore it. One, it was a gift and my friend expected me to do something with it. Two, the blade and tote had USVB stamped into them. I have no idea what USVB means, but it was interesting.


After a solid three day weekend of derusting, grinding, sharpening and gluing the handle back together, the final result wasn't too bad. It will never win a beauty prize. It has noticeable pitting all over it. But the bottom is flat, the blade beds well and it makes a good roughing plane. I find that I use it all the time when rough-truing stock. It's set to be almost as coarse as a scrub plane and can remove a lot of wood in a hurry. It just goes to show, looks can be deceiving.

Planing and Trueing With Hand Tools

Today's task was to take some of the split maple that has been "curing" in my basement and turn it from firewood to fine spalted maple.


This is literally some pieces of firewood that I purposefully left outside for a while and then brought in for final air drying, hopefully to end up with some fine spalted patterns. The challenge is to take this highly irregular piece of vegetable matter which was formed with little consideration to my needs and impose retangularity upon it. Oh, and I have no planer or jointer.


Task one was to strip off the bark with a drawknife. This was quickly and easily done. The bark fell off in a few large sheets.


Next I decided to rip the edges to some semblance of regularity. Fortunately, I have a fine Bosch Jigsaw, model 1591 EVS. This one has a barrel grip, not the handle grip. I was successful in ripping one side reasonably straight, and then hit it with my foreplane to bring it into some sort of precision trueness, which I could use as a reference edge.

Next step was to roughly true one face with my ECE scrub plane. This was quickly done, and now having a face that was within Grand Canyon precision of being flat, I was able to scribe a line from the reference edge to the opposite edge and joint it roughly down to the line.

Now, having a piece that would lay flat on the bench and could be gripped firmly, I was in a position to plane off the last face, which was extremely rough and at an odd angle to the reference face. You can see from the picture that I am using a couple of Lee Valley bench pups. These are great and you need to get a pair. I also have the board wedged against a planing stop which consists of a piece of scrap plywood screwed to a scrap of oak board which can be gripped in the bench vise. My choice at this point was my trusty Stanley #5C. This plane is very rough. It's had a hard life. It is, however, perfectly suitable for coarse flattening. My blade is strongly cambered for deep cuts and the throat is very wide for passing thick chips.

This plane worked well and I followed it with my all woodie Jack plane, an antique that I picked up on E-Bay, but that makes a finer cut. By now, I'm ready to flip the other face up and smooth it some more. A few minutes of this and the piece is now 1" thick and relatively square. I'll true it up further when I'm ready to use it in a project.

Meanwhile, I have a basement full of this "firewood" that I've got to true up.

Manifesto

I've been told that you should start your blog with a manifesto that explains your philosophy or your purpose. I thought about writing "I'm just here to have a good time playing in my woodshop", but I figured I should come up with something more pedantic that essentially says the same thing, so here goes.

The New Arts and Crafts Movement

The original Arts and Crafts movement had a strong element of socialism in it. It was an attempt to improve the lives of the masses by eliminating the capitalists and factories. The founders especially found fault with division of labor and romanticized the individual craftsman. As Ruskin said 'It is not truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men: - divided into mere segments of men - broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail.'

Thus, the original Arts and Crafts movement was a social movement. It was also a backwards looking reaction to the excesses of the industrial revolution. Ruskin, Morris and others romanticized the Middle Ages with its emphasis on Guilds. The idea of the designer and the craftsman united into one person was appealing to them. They did not like the concept of the designer as an elite industrial engineer and the worker as a limited, truncated troglodyte serving a machine. Ruskin’s popular book, The Stones of Venice (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964, c1960, original credo of the Arts and Crafts Movement), makes this point (although the book is almost unreadable to the modern eye. Victorian writers wrote in a florid style that is just too long winded before ever getting to the point).

Here in the 21^st century, all of that backward looking romanticism is long dead. The Middle Ages are not romanticized any more, but recognized as dirty, unhealthy, intellectually straight jacketed and socially frozen. The impracticality of returning to a small shop guild system is recognized, but fortunately, the ills of industrial revolution have been more or less ameliorated. Labor is not as brutally exploited and workers have more of a say in the activities of the factory floor.

However, life is not completely wonderful here in the technological vastness of the future. The relentless onslaught of multimedia manipulation from our mercantile overlords demands that we work at meaningless jobs for money that we squander on meaningless tech toys in the belief that this makes us happy. Well, it doesn’t. It just keeps us satiated so we will prime the pump and make the overlords richer. Sorry to sound overly Socialist here, but that's just the way it is.

The juggernaut of the advertising machine will continue to have most people completely beguiled and trapped in the soft chains of a software life. However, each individual can choose to manage his or her life differently. When the modern worker comes home to a MacMansion, popped up in a MacSubdivision, surrounded by MacRestaurants and MacMalls, he or she can make a decision whether to pop in a CD, turn on the TV, throw in a DVD, fire up the Play Station, read the MacNews on the MacNet, chat with virtual friends about their virtual life in a virtual world, or perhaps, make an alternate individual decision and do something creative and uplifting.

The New Arts and Crafts Movement is not a social movement, but an individual movement. The idea that the designer and the worker can be united into one individual is not dead. The idea that each individual can devise suitable work methods based on his or her own needs and not what Home Depot or Sears wants to sell is not dead. It is not a social movement but an individual movement.

You and I make the decision what we do with all that leisure time that the technological revolution has supposedly given to us. We decide what to buy with our paycheck and to what degree we are enslaved by our ties to the mercantile dictatorship. Even though we would like to think that we are different from the serfs of the Middle Ages and have freedom, we are not and we do not. We just have a slightly longer leash. What we do with that leash makes all the difference.

Which means, I'm just here to have a good time playing in my woodshop.